No it’s not. Some things are better done in BfA while some are better in SL, and depending on what is more important to whom, they will rank them that way. For me personally, BfA has been a better expansion (for now), but I think both are very bad.
Probably this one:
See also Preach’s Response
and Asmongold’s commentary on Preach’s reaction
and Kevin Jordan’s reaction to Preach
… and I still don’t know what he thinks was wrong with Wrath vendors!
1 Like
Because for reasosn…
I never played BFA and only came back to the game after SL prepatch. As far as I feel, both expansions have fundemental issues because of the borrowed systems.
The problem of SL so far for me
- Most Classes not feel very good/fluid to play with/without these systems
- Systems on top of other systems with unnecessary complexity
- A lot of meta specs at the moment are heavily depending on the signature lego and covenant skill
- Dictated and sole path/area to farm these systems which are not fun to play (torghast, maw, etc)
- It is not attractive to farm these systems more than once on one char, let alone on alts
- Intential game, map, quest design to waste player time and boost /played metric rather than fun and rewarding content
- Overall, it just feels “meh” or lack of the warcraft feel and authenticity in SL
2 Likes
wait, we got a whole weekly run of boreghast and farming mythic+ ?
omg so much content !!!
compare it to bfa launch with 6 lands +1 empty island (which later added with new faction and FULL of new monsters never seen before and unique mount, both enemy and allies) and 2 hub living cities full of stuff and ALOT of quests in every place. structures, villages, stories and mini-stories (which all lead to one moment). random assaults which include parachute, bombing, destroying, stopping, flag, and other NEW stuff. sure, it get repititive, but its new and exciting for the first time. flight paths in the correct locations. you “build” new bases by doing special missions. the world evolves. alot more stuff in professions.
etc…
bfa was part of WORLD of warcraft.
shadowlands is just “do few stuff and finish for the week” and "we got 4 new zones and hub city, but they are empty. i dont feel like im walking in a living place.
3 Likes
…and I used none of that outside of doing emissaries, so it doesn’t matter. Nevertheless, Shadowlands may have fewer, and smaller zones, but there’s plenty of content in them. There’s an incredible number of small little things you can discover, that add to the immersive experience. There are a lot of small touches all around the place that tell you about the Shadowlands.
BfA had some of those too, but Shadowlands has much more.
And now we have a central city and 4 covenant hubs. The covenant sanctums are full of stuff you can do, with the upgrades and all, plenty of activities tied to them as well. All of them have pretty elaborate stories, Oribos included. There are NPCs you can talk to, which all share tidbits, and as you do the covenant campaign, there’s more and more you learn about it.
So instead of 1 hub / faction, we now have 5 in total, with quests, stories, mini-stories, and so on. I call that a vast improvement.
Oh, and we don’t have Dazar’alor, which is also nice. The city did look beautiful, but having to navigate it on a daily basis? Please, it was the worst city hub in a long, long, long time.
Which were maybe fun once and a bore ever after.
Now we have WQs with mirrors, an ampitheatre event, you can even throw a weekly party for the Venthyr, build your own stitchwerk golem for the Necrolords, and so on. Plenty of new things, some of which are way more fun than any assault. We have the Arena in Maldraxxus, we have quests to sneak past enemies and pickpocket them, we have quests where we don a pair of wings and fly. Or disguise ourselves as a moth and collect cones. Or herd gornlings or whatever those things are called, with a flute.
You know, NEW stuff.
So does Shadowlands, if you open your eyes and not just complain.
Shadowlands lets you do that, and that’s amazing. The game allowing you to log off is good. You can do more, of course, there’s a lot of things you can do in game if you want to be logged on 24/7. Not having to do that, though, is a huge improvement.
As for being empty: neither my covenant sanctum or Oribos is ever empty, in my experience. I always see people there. There’s often a train of frogs, or more recently, trees walking around Oribos, people training at the dummies in the sanctum, etc.
I remember many interesting quests from BfA, even side quests, while in SL I don’t remember a single quest. Zones are ridiculous to compare. BfA zones are masterpieces compared to SL. Drustvar and Nazmir are perhaps the two best zones ever, creepy and beautiful at the same time, perfectly balanced.
3 Likes
Pve wise its pretty damn amazing.
Pvp wise its a mess.
BFA > SL
BFA had more mmorpg feeling to it.
5 Likes
Yes. A hundred times yes. And a hundred times better than legion too.
1 Like
people hated bfa so much and for so long time they would take anything in its place, right now they are saying they like sl much more
but they hate/dislike the maw, they hate torghast but those are two major content components!, the gearing system sucks, the raid is not the best with many over laps people dont enjoy!(look at slg fight), many fights where you need to stop dps on mythic
right now people stopped logging in its 3 months after expansion people fed up with the game, thats what i see in my guild and in some guilds on draenor, people struggling to form raid groups
class balance? worst balance since classic
so what left? yes nice graphics, nice areas, nice music all those things i would not put priorities on my favorite mmo game
for me bfa was better, it was a compete product, sl is unfinished and lacking content i just hope they will polish it at the end of the expansion
3 Likes
I prefer BFA all the way for the following reasons:
More generous with loot and I like the borrowed power mechanic more there than SL which I have to farm torghast and buy the leggo.
I liked t he Lore way more. SL is way too much over the top.
And the most important for me is that BFA felt like Warcraft while SL is like a different game.
4 Likes
Actually Shadowlands is the worst expansion to date.
It have good lore and ok the story with covenants and all other are a HUGE joke!
Balancing classes is pathetic, meta classes are lame, PvP is a cd 1shotfest and the latest valor system is really really bad and useless good only for people over 1.2k raider io and destroy all others we try to move up to 1k.
I can’t wait my subscription to end cause after 2005 in a relaxed Sunday i prefer to spend 4 hours in GTA V Single player than login into WoW.
5 Likes
Id rather kill one boss for a wq than enrage 6 sylvars as a slow moth while 20 other players do it and druid bots moonfiring the sylvar giving you no credit for it or that find 10 party guests that is just a spriggan but theres 47 horde players stealing all your kills and lets not forget the amazing put 10 spriggans in a bag but it will not be added to your bag if yours are full of anima and profession items while not being warned about the full inventory making you waste time or that shoot down 45 flies wq or that turn into a mushroom and put 5 hours trying to find a mob because of extremely low mob density and spawn rate or that as mentioned, spider on the wall where you have a cast time to tag a mob to steal an item but bots will hit it forcing you to wait for respawn or lastly, the amazing fly and pick 10 cocoon world quest. But thats just my opinion:3
most people forget that content in an mmo doesnt necessarily mean loot and raids. content is what makes you feel you are in a new living place. where your character can evolve. a place that FEELS like it will keep on going even when you are logged off.
for me, i never felt that way in SL. but i did in bfa.
Imo everything is worse, as you said stat diminishing is really bad, aoe caps even worse. And I don’t think the game ever had worse balance than this. All in all its just bad and I rather want classic BFA than this.
Luckily, you don’t have to do any of those if you find them troublesome. 
I know I have WQs I hate doing, so I simply never do them. If I have a calling to do 3 WQs, and there’s no simple ones up? I wait, and check by at night. I have 3 days to complete the calling, pretty sure I’ll find 3 easy WQs by that time. If not, I skip the calling, simple as that.
BfA had awful WQs aswell, the only decent ones were the kill 1 elite. Most of them weren’t that, though. BfA emissaries often spanned multiple zones too, which required quite a bit of travel (doubly so pre-pathfinder), while Callings are for a specific zone, making it a whole lot easier to complete.
I’ll take Shadowlands WQs and Callings over BfA WQs and emissaries, because the only good thing about BfA WQs were the elite ones. Every other WQ, you skipped. Shadowlands has much more decent WQs, and less horrible ones.
They really screwed the pooch with covenants by locking them with power abilities. It made most people not care and just go for what’s best.
They knew and they still wanted to do it. People would’ve been far more invested in their covenant if it wasn’t tied to power.
When faced with a choice between power and fantasy, most people will choose power.
Also, Death blossom. WTH is up with that? Useless herb that spawns 4x more than the zone’s herbs. Truly infuriating.
It’s a difficult question though. I liked the Zones and warfronts. The rewards were out of whack. The systems are less bad in SL though. But the theme, i liked best in BfA. Not the faction war. The theme of the high seas, naga, mechagon and old god.
I honestly, no longer remember why we are even on the SL anymore. To rescue Anduin? To catch Sylvanas? It looks like they have their own plans for that already. I’d be fine going back to Azeroth and leave them at it.
1 Like
People seem to forget just how god awful BfA was at launch. We didn’t have super quick max levelled azerite gear, we didn’t have titan residuum until 8.1 if i recall correctly, we didn’t have all the borrowed power until 8.3 (which was pretty fun to use once you got all the BiS corruptions on you), we didn’t have anything to do basically at level 120 other than farming m+ and getting azerite power from the stupid magni quests and my god we had island expeditions which were flawed in so many ways.
SL is way better in my opinion
1 Like
From pvp perspective its same shlt and different package.